xylem

Too late to go back to sleep -- It's time to trust your instincts

like millions of other people on earth, every time I play the song Defying Gravity something opens in me. I feel pumped, an immediate sense of possibility, like let’s, fucking, go. I find it beautiful, energizing, and quite profound. as a secret joke with myself but also a real grounding tool I have been listening to it before comedy sets and let me tell you it gets my mind RIGHT.

Watching the new version of the movie this winter I felt renewed permission¹ to love it because the story is so anti fascist. I didn’t remember this from my experience of it as a kid. Defying Gravity is an anti fascist anthem, and lord knows we need anti fascist anthems right now, i.e. i’m through accepting limits, cause someone says they’re so / no Wizard that there is or was is ever gonna bring me down…..you hear it.

to be honest the wizard and his wizard friends are kind of bringing me down, but i feel lifted when i remember all the examples of deep integrity in art and in organizing across time. aka Elphaba. there are characters and people who can hear/feel themselves through all the noise of distortion, delusion, oppression, and who act on what they hear.

Elphaba is, in the words of Harmony Holiday inside of somebody who loves her. she sings, “something has changed within me, something is not the same, I’m through with playing by the rules of someone else’s game.” and Harmony writes, “It’s like the first time you catch a glimpse of yourself through eyes that notice and really believe, how beautiful you are, and the way that realization cannot be shut down by doubt or tentativeness ever again, and so must be lived, the poem is that moment of enchantment and its endlessly unruly future.”

this realization makes Elphaba capable of flight, it makes the rest of us unwilling to tolerate violence, misery, domination.

fascism tries to tamp this other, greater authority — the one that Elphaba heeds, the prophetic one, the truthful, fiercely loving one. i believe that deep down, it is instinctual. we know better, and we forget. the more we listen to it, the more it rises in us and propels us — like water traveling upward through xylem tissue, like witches who tried to tell us leaving us in the dust, like the crescendo of a song, or of the truth that we are no longer able to ignore.

1. too many of us (it’s me) are acting like we’re better than musicals